Orson Welles, Vol I (10 page)

His writing, here and everywhere, was an occasional thing for him; but it is from the start entirely characteristic. In 1928, he was the editor of
Red and White: Tosebo
[ = TOdd SEminary for BOys]
Camp Number
: the frontispiece contains a sketch – signed by Welles – of a man carrying a placard that proclaims
OUR PLATFORM: A BIGGER, BETTER, SNAPPIER, RED AND WHITE.
The first piece is a ‘History of Todd’ by
ORSON WELLES,
brisk and clear; then comes ‘Item: Senior Literary Society Starts Active Year: “Senior Society has staged some interesting Friday night sessions this fall. Rivalry is keen
and some creditable bits of literary work have been produced. Orson Welles’s paper of October 19th was the high spot of the term thus far.”’ Nothing like editorial impartiality. ‘Theatricals’ is by Staff Drama Critic, whose tone of voice is oddly familiar. He is reviewing
Sweetheart Town
, at the Woodstock Opera House. One has to remind oneself that it is a thirteen-year-old writing.

‘The whole
piece was rather loosely put together … for instance,
The March of the Wooden Soldiers
was used in a drawing-room setting with no lines either before or after to give it the slightest plausibility. Evidently the producing company had the costumes and figured it was an easy number to stage so in it went. The leads were handled by very competent talent but the chorus work was rather pitiful in spots.’
⁴⁴
Very strict; a hint perhaps of a note session after one of the young Welles’s rehearsals. The Tosebo Camp number 1928 closes with a cartoon, also by the editor, which is in effect the earliest surviving Welles storyboard. 1. Opening two shot, medium close-up; 2. wide shot on boys’ backs; 3. close-up on speaker, as other boy disappears, leaving behind only an exclamation mark, a question mark
and a puff of dust. His sense of line was highly developed; his father’s hopes for him as a cartoonist were not founded on nothing. His confidence leaps off the page. Nothing said is remarkable; nor is it said remarkably. But it is said loud and clear. It expects to be heard.

His journalism went professional that same summer of 1928, while he was staying with Maurice Bernstein in his holiday
retreat.
The Highland Park News
of 6 July 1928 printed an ominous headline:
RAVINIA STARS BEWARE.
‘On page eight of this issue,’ ran the story, ‘we are introducing Orson Welles, our 13-year-old drama critic, cub reporter and what have you …’ Though the intention is merry, there is something a little disquieting about it. The first article opens in the middle-aged leftover Edwardian style Welles
was often to affect in later life.

‘Cover the opera,’ quoth the editor the other evening as he threw down the proof-sheet he had been reading and gave me a professionally ‘editorial’ look with those beautiful eyes of his. ‘Play Ravinia for all it’s worth, it’s good, interesting news!’

Well, to begin with – there’s hardly any opera to write about!
Yes, you will remind me that the most reliable of Ravinia’s stars have appeared on the stage in costume, that people have flocked to the park, that tickets are on sale at the gate … but I will not admit that there has been any real performances as yet, some lovely singing yes, but Ravinia was not half as beautiful last week, as it will be next and the weeks to come.

He goes on in this unlovely
vein, revealing how ‘Martinelli came near swallowing his moustache which had come off in the heat, or how An Onion [ = A. Anian, a leading singer of the day] fell off a stool to the unsuppressed enjoyment of both the audience and singers. But,’ he continues, ‘I have some dandy jokes planned on the singers for next week, some news that wouldn’t get into print otherwise, some verse, I hope some
reviews, and – well …’ He signs off with a prayer that ‘both the opera and this column will be improved, I am, Orson Welles.’ A familiar sign-off.

The column is so repulsive in tone, it’s almost inconceivable that he was asked to repeat it. But he was:

Last week I insinuated that there had been no real performance of opera in Ravinia and I think I was right.

He goes on to praise the
casts of
Lohengrin, Manon
and
Trovatore
, reserving his main comment for Montemezzi’s Wagnerian verismo opera,
L’amore Dei Tre Re
:

The incomparable Lazzar! the Mansfield of modern Opera he should be called. If you have gasped when he strangles Fiora and thrilled ’neath the spell of one of America’s most glorious
voices, then I advise you to go to
Fra Diavolo
next week and laugh at the comical
hobo who eats spaghetti and does the most convincing murder on the stage with equal artistry.

It is noteworthy that all the specific comment is to do with the acting, not the music. The third column continues the raillery:

… and omitting the accident suffered by Rethberg’s ‘territory’ when a light slithered down from the flys and struck her in the middle of a dramatic area (wherever that
is). I would lay down my job and hie myself to the ‘eatery’ where I would replenish the empty corridors of my bread basket with healthful nourishment. The best I can do is promise a better article next time, and a review of
Fra Diavolo
. Another journalistic tragedy. And so to the printery!

Two ominous signs: he eats when he can’t work; and he resorts to that ancient journalistic standby, the
column about the impossibility of writing a column. There were two more columns in exactly the same vein. Unpalatable though all this is, it is a passable imitation of what an adult journalist in the same mould might have written, though Welles was perhaps able to be slightly more rebarbative, hiding behind his youth. This is precocity run riot; not a pretty sight. The writing itself is what an
exuberant and opinionated thirteen-year-old might jot down in letter form – there are letters of Mozart at the same age which are as bumptious and as callous – but there are few thirteen-year-olds who would commit themselves to newsprint in like vein – few who would want to; even fewer who would be asked to. Maurice Bernstein seems to be behind this: his summer house in Highland Park was near to
his beloved Moores and the Crafts Watsons. No doubt a discreet word in the editor’s ear had swung it.

When Welles was not with Bernstein (with whom he sometimes travelled; together, in 1927, they took a cruise to Cuba) he was with his father. They too travelled, quite how far and how often it is now impossible to determine; China was on the itinerary at least twice. He later claimed that he
led a restlessly peripatetic life with his father, spending part of every year in Shanghai, another part in Jamaica where his father supposedly had a winter residence, at other times flitting from European capital to European capital. The years of wandering are an essential part of the biography of the artist, his meetings with remarkable men, his hidden years. ‘I rollicked around my whole childhood,’
⁴⁵
he told Huw Wheldon.

‘What places do you remember most vividly from this early,
globe-trotting period?’
⁴⁶
asked Kenneth Tynan in 1967. ‘Berlin had about three good years, from 1926 onward,’ replied Welles (he was then aged eleven to fourteen) ‘but the best cities were certainly Budapest and Peking. They had the best talk and the most action right up to the end.’ Just how good were Welles’s
Hungarian and Mandarin, one wonders? To Bazin and the
Cahiers du Cinéma
team he said that he’d seen an enormous number of German stage productions in his childhood, also Russian and French ones; while he told Bogdanovich that he’d seen ‘all the great ones, Werner Krauss and Kachalov’
⁴⁷
(Craig’s and Stanislavsky’s Hamlet). Then he goes too far: ‘this hand that touches you now once touched the hand
of Sarah Bernhardt – can you imagine that?’ Well barely, since her last stage appearance in America was in 1918 (when Welles was three), and her last onstage appearance anywhere – it was in France – was in 1920. ‘The hand I saw was a claw covered with liver spots and liquid white and with the pointy ends of her sleeves glued over the back of it,’ he reports, a brilliant and vivid description,
as striking when said by Orson Welles as it was when said by Micheál Mac Liammóir, to whom it actually happened.

This little economy with the truth, however, does not discredit all the rest. Dr Bernstein told a journalist that in 1929, he and two other boys went to Europe visiting France, England and Italy. The records of the police in Italian, claimed the not always wholly reliable Dadda,
show that Orson was arrested for sleeping in the park and throwing a stunt fit in the streets. There is clear evidence that he was in Munich and possibly Berlin in 1929; he was on a walking tour with the school, sending back to his nurse in Chicago a boisterously boyish card: ‘How you’d love it here … the beer! Oh, baby!’
⁴⁸
which is probably what she wanted to hear, not a scene-by-scene account
of
Jedermann
. (Later, he reported how he’d been sitting in a Munich beer hall, when some funny little chap in a Charlie Chaplin moustache started to harangue the audience … Even Roger Hill, who reports this story, was a little sceptical of Orson’s Zelig-like ability to be present at every crucial moment in modern history.)

As often as not, however, Welles and his father would go to Grand Detour.
In 1925, the year before Welles went to Todd, Dick had, on an alcoholic whim, bought the admirable Sheffield House Hotel, so glowingly described in its brochure. Evidently Dick’s chums, Charles and Lotte Sheffield, who had rebuilt the
hotel after it had burnt down at the turn of the century, had had enough; they had been running it for fifteen years. It must have taken some running, too: a sixty-room
L-shaped frame building, it had steam heat and indoor plumbing, and boasted a fine restaurant with an excellent cook. There were two waitresses; on Sundays the restaurant pulled in customers from as far as Rockford or Clinton, Iowa. Although not quite what Welles claimed for it – ‘America’s most exclusive hotel’
⁴⁹
– it was a splendid place, then surrounded by elms, all of which were wiped out
in the 1960s.

Dick approached the business of being a hotelier with unexpected seriousness, sensibly buying the Sheffield General Store; he it was who converted its upper level into the dance hall on whose springy floor Orson danced in the moonlight. He also rented a small unpainted building on River Street and turned it into a giant toy house for Orson, filling it with ‘wonderful Chicago-built
toys’,
⁵⁰
in the envious words of a contemporary Grand Detourian. Welles liked to claim that his father had bought the hotel because he liked the service, then threw all the guests out. He was also said – by Welles, of course – to have admitted only old music-hall performers as guests; or, alternatively, to have recruited his staff exclusively from vaudevillians. None of this was true: the clientele,
actively encouraged, consisted mainly of Chicago artists on their sketching expeditions or casual tourists in the region. The restaurant was frequented by people from miles around; you had to book to be sure of a table. Dick was rarely there; in his absence the hotel was run, profitably and efficiently, by the excellent staff, most of whom he had inherited from the Sheffields. It is entirely
possible, none the less, as Orson remembered, that he smoked his own sausages, and that ‘you’d wake up in the morning to the sound of the folks in the bake-house and the smells …’
⁵¹
For Welles Grand Detour was ‘one of the Merrie Englands’. He felt that he’d had ‘a childhood in the last century from these short summers’. Idyllic though it assuredly was, he remained unable to form any relationship
with the people of Grand Detour. Even the man who drove him the four-hour journey to Todd and back in Dick Welles’s brand-new, four-door Chevrolet (no
cars
, Orson? Just Daddy’s, perhaps) ‘never got to know Orson well’.
⁵²

Dick Welles, on the other hand, seems to have been much liked, and not regarded in the least as eccentric. The only feature of his father’s regime worth commenting on was
his regular and profound drunkenness. ‘Eccentric’ is a much more agreeable word than ‘drunk’; it is touching of Welles that in order to convince himself
of the euphemism, he invented the appropriate eccentricities.

It all ended very suddenly on 28 May 1928. The Chicago artists were sketching in their bad-weather studio over the Landmark restaurant, while the chambermaids were burning some
papers in the grate. A few of the burning papers entered the upstairs lumber room; the fire took hold. People poured out of the hotel, including a confused Dick Welles. The building burned to the ground; overnight, someone stole the large boiler from the basement. The next day, Dick Welles left Grand Detour, and never went back. Nor did Orson. Over the years, he marinaded the events of that night,
turning them into a charming tragic-comic tale. ‘We’d just returned from China, and there was a nice Christmassy fall of snow on the ground the night of the fire,’
⁵³
he wrote in his memoir. The fire actually occurred on 28 May, during the day, and they hadn’t been to China that year, nor was Orson present; he was in Highland Park, doling out bad reviews to hapless opera singers. ‘The six-mile
distance was too great for the Dixon Fire Department which arrived to preside over the smoking ruins of what had been America’s most exclusive hotel. At the very last moment, my father (the suspected arsonist) emerged from the flames dressed only in his nightshirt, carrying in one hand an empty parrot cage and in the other, a framed, hand-tinted photograph of a lady in pink tights (an ex-mistress
fondly remembered) named Trixi Friganza.’ Something stirred at the back of Welles’s mind as he wrote this, and he comments on the extraordinary coincidence that both his father’s favourite mistress and his mother should have had the same unusual nickname. He does not recall that at the time of the fire he himself had a hand-tinted photograph of that other Trixie, his mother, at his own bedside.